Frog Hotel

[Image: Manuel Roig-Franzia/Washington Post].

Panama’s Hotel Campestre now caters to an unusually specific clientele: endangered frogs. There, frogs “get the full spa treatment. Daily cleansing rinses. Exotic lunches. Even 24-hour room service.” In fact, it is “the frogs’ own Hotel California,” we read, “a place where they could check in but could never check out.”Mixing metaphors, the hotel is nothing less than “a Noah’s Ark for frogs,” its residents arriving in the specimen boxes of concerned volunteers and scientists. There are “glass frogs with skin so translucent that their organs are always on full display.” There are “frogs that look like rocks and eat freshwater crabs, aggressive tree frogs and shy, nocturnal toads.” There are even frogs with “a taste for the good life.” This means that the males of the species “happily hop on the backs of the much larger females, who carry them around for as long as 80 days searching for just the right spot to breed.” I’ve tried this method, and the results are spectacular.Perhaps coming soon: Honeymoon at the Frog Hotel, a new film by Pixar…